Drug sensitivity testing, a unique drug selection strategy

Abstract

Cancer treatments become more effective now. One cause of these therapeutic promotions is based on drug selective paradigms in the clinic. A small range of drug selective paradigms (pharmacogenomics, precision-oncology, biomarkers and drug sensitivity testing) have been widely used worldwide. To accelerate the performance of these drug selective strategies, improved understanding of different mechanisms may be useful. Among these four classes of selective systems, drug sensitivity testing (DST) plays a unique role in clinical trials. Biomedical advances of knowledge and technology in current drug selective systems are increasingly importance. In the past two decades, knowledge gap between pathology and therapeutics is gradually filling, especially among different predictive mechanisms. The different drug selective systems are competitive, progress and advantageous in different clinical situations. To face with this diversity of drug selective strategies, guiding principle and technical feasibility need to emphasize. As a powerful platform, DST have some unique characters—high-quality quantification and comparison of responses among anticancer drug of interests. The smooth progress of DST platform depends on increasingly understanding of cancer biology, pathology and pharmacology—including medical knowledge (cancer heterogeneity, plasticity, stem cells and metastasis) and technical versatility (micro-fluidity and apoptotic evaluation). The medical and technical insights into various and uniqueness of DST are especially highlighted in this article.